Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

I’ve never been to war.  I’ve never been shot at, never had my life seriously threatened.  I’ve never killed another human being, or seen one die.

It is impossible for the reality of any of those sensations to be fully conveyed to someone who has never experienced them.  No film, no matter how powerful or insightful, could truly encapsulate those feelings.  But as Tim O’Brien wrote in “How to Tell a True War Story,”

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

The Hurt Locker is a true war story.  It may be impossible to understand war without living it, but the film captures the essence of that experience.  Through remarkable cinematography and utterly convincing  performances, it communicates the intensity, the fear, the confusion of desert warfare with a calm sense of authority.  If it wasn’t such good filmmaking, it would be all too easy to believe the events were completely real.

Instead of the traditional angle of battle-hardened footsoldiers on the front lines of combat, The Hurt Locker focuses on a small Army bomb squad, a group of men faced with the most unpredictable and fearsome element of guerrilla warfare.  It is the threat of the unknowable that lends The Hurt Locker its incredible sense of tension; even with its protagonist bulked up in protective bomb gear, the omnipresent danger makes him and his squad seem naked and exposed in the wide open streets of Baghdad.

Nearly every scene in the film is intense and riveting, but it never cashes in its audience’s emotional investment with cheap tricks.  There are no shocking plot twists — in fact, The Hurt Locker does a remarkable job portraying the lives of three soldiers and their experiences in war without trying to tie them into a more grandiose plot.  There is no storyline here, no villain — just the day in, day out threat of death.  There are no random explosions, no contrived conversations.  Even the tenuous camaraderie James and Sanborn develop is strained, natural.

The long moments of eerie stillness in The Hurt Locker become its most compelling because the potential for death always lingers, always hangs in the air (the sparing use of music also highlights the emptiness of many a scene).  The cinematography bolsters the tense atmosphere with tight shots and expert hand-held camera work.  Even though the shaky cameras depict the action from close-up like authentic war time documentaries, plenty of shots still convey the scope of the desert and the rubble-strewn city hiding homemade bombs under plastic bags and broken concrete.

Despite how accurately The Hurt Locker depicts the middle east, perhaps the most powerful shot in the film comes when James returns homes.  A wide shot of cereal boxes in an empty Publix, seemingly stretching across both ends of the screen and into infinity, cause a man who once risked his life on a daily basis to look hopelessly lost.

It is rare for a war movie, especially one about bombs, to be so captivating when no explosions are erupting on the screen.  No doubt writer Mark Boal basing the script on real experiences made The Hurt Locker the powerful film it is, but the work is subtle.  Since there’s no flashy dialogue, the actors all but assume the identities of the characters.  Watching each of them grapple with the war in their own way begs the question: how many true war stories from Iraq are out there even now, just waiting to be told?

Most of them never will be, but The Hurt Locker tells their essence.  No moral.  No rectitude.  Just people.